"One of his own men shot him?"
"That's right," said the big FBI man. "We went into his apartment an instant too late. We found eight madmen and a near-corpse. We're not sure what happened, and we're not sure we want to know. Anything that can drive eight reasonably stable men off the deep end in less than an hour is nothing to meddle around with."
"I wonder what went wrong?" asked the Secretary of no one in particular.
Scherzo—Presto
PAUL WENDELL, too, was wondering what went wrong.
Slowly, over a period of immeasurable time, memory seeped back into him. Bits of memory, here and there, crept in from nowhere, sometimes to be lost again, sometimes to remain. Once he found himself mentally humming an odd, rather funeral tune:
Now, though you'd have said that the head was dead,
For its owner dead was he,
It stood on its neck with a smile well-bred,
And bowed three times to me.
It was none of your impudent, off-hand nods....
Wendell stopped and wondered what the devil seemed so important about the song.
Slowly, slowly, memory returned.
When he suddenly realized, with crashing finality, where he was and what had happened to him, Paul Wendell went violently insane. Or he would have, if he could have become violent.